


Penumbra

by Shadows_echoes



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Character Development, Character Growth, Gen, Grief, Original Character Death(s), Other, Past Relationship(s), References to Depression, Slow Burn, the first chapter is probably the angst-iest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-05 07:46:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16806406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadows_echoes/pseuds/Shadows_echoes
Summary: Connor’s gone. Colin isn’t.





	Penumbra

**Author's Note:**

> There are a couple of names circulating for Connor -60 (the one who takes Hank to Cyberlife Tower), but Colin is what I first saw so that’s what I’m rolling with.

Connor pauses, looking over his shoulder at you from across the street, a sad smile gracing his lips.

But it’s his eyes. His eyes that linger for just a few seconds too long before he turns around and disappears inside the building. That’s when you know he’s not coming back out- that he didn’t _anticipate_ coming back out.

It was a suicide mission and he’d just said his last goodbye.

His name tears itself from your throat, panicked and terrified, and you’re running. Running to stop him, running to drag him back outside the building, running to go in with him- just running to _him._ Always, _always,_ to him.

You’re stopped before you even take a single step off the sidewalk you’d been waiting on, your boots failing to make contact with the dark asphalt of the road. Steel-like arms wrap around you, caging you in, caging you from where you needed to go, from where you needed to be. Caging you away from Connor.

“ _No, no, no, no! Let me go!_ ” you shriek, hysteria rising up inside your chest like a fatal disease, infecting everything.

You tear at the arms that hold you, mutilating the dark fabric of his jacket and clawing at his exposed skin viciously enough to draw thin lines of blue to the surface.

It wasn’t enough.

Your gaze was fixed on the spot you last saw Connor, so far across the street.

It wasn’t enough.

And you were _here._

It wasn’t enough.

_Clawing and struggling wasn’t enough._

Whirling around in the cage of his arms, you go directly for his thirium pump.

Urgent fingers make it past the heavy layers of his clothing and the heavier layers of his defenses rapidly enough to leave deep oblongs in the pale skin above the biocomponent you were digging for, the one you so desperately needed him to be without. Only for now. Only for long enough to let you slip away.

You cared but you didn’t. You just needed to _go._ You needed to get to _Connor._

But just as he had demonstrated seconds ago, the man whose heart you were trying to disable was faster than you. He always had been.

If you hadn’t been as single-mindedly focused as you were, you would be surprised he actually let you get as far as you did in the first place.

His hands have caught your wrists in a crushing grip and he shakes you roughly. Just once. “ _Stop!_ ”

It spurs you on.

Because it was hisvoice, it was _Connor’s_ voice, even if it wasn’t Connor.

You’re using every move in the book, attacking every single weak spot you can possibly think of, every single vulnerability Connor had ever mentioned, with a furious intensity which grows more frantic with every passing second you are still _here._

He was restraining himself, you idly knew, if he wasn’t then you would be unconscious or dead by now. But whatever leniency he’d been giving seemed to evaporate the moment you went for his artificial heart.

“ _Stop. Moving_.” The command is made of ice, shortly flung into your face and leaving frostbite around your bruising wrists from his biting fingers.

“Let me go!” It’s a half hysteric chant that leaves your lips in response, sometimes screamed, sometimes a wavering plea. But in the end, it doesn’t matter; he doesn’t let go.

Fear. Not just of Connor failing to return, but of helplessness. Of an inability to do anything when you’re _so close._ Fear consumes every inch of you.

You fight using everything you have left, your panic acting as fuel, urging you onwards, but you make no progress. Scrapping the bottom of your arsenal, you crash the top of your forehead into his nose with as much force as you can muster.

It works. It distracts him- stuns him.

But only for a second. Not nearly for long enough to fully pry yourself out of his grip.

Blue blood springs from his nose and his eyes become dry ice dyed brown, so frigid they burned. It’s all you see, his eyes -the eyes that were identical to Connor’s in every way that didn’t matter- before he spins you around. The front of his knee sharply meets the back of yours and you hit the concrete with a sharp pain that goes entirely unnoticed by you.

He follows you to the ground, his forearm finding a place above your sternum to keep you in place, to keep you from scrambling away.

He is a solid, unmovable presence at your back, a weight that keeps you away from Connor. And you’re screaming now -the kind that rips your throat apart. The kind that was no longer a name or an order but the kind without words.

You start clawing again, reverting back to your initial attempts. Your fingers are shaking with desperation but you pry at the arm so close to your throat all the same, grasping for leverage.

It’s easy to dig your fingers into him, you noted, but impossible to pry his arm away. He’s too strong.

You’re too far away to be hit by the shrapnel when the building finally explodes.

Glass and bricks and wood go flying in every direction, and the heat from the fire engulfing the building across the street licks at your skin. The bright flames burn through the tears streaming from your eyes and directly into your retinas.

Numbly, you lean forward in a feeble attempt to keep going as if there was still some chance, as if you were no longer caged.

But you were still caged.

Except now the immovable arm that had rooted you to the spot was now holding you up, and your lacerating fingers were now clinging, blindly holding on in an absentminded search for stability.

-

You ignore the knocking at the front door in favor of staring out of a window, the same window you’d been staring out of for hours.

Raindrops littered the glass, distorting the cloudy remnants of the evening’s light and morphing the yellow lighting seeping from your neighbors’ windows into odd shapes. Once heavy enough, the droplets fell, abiding gravity’s inevitable pull to the earth and racing towards the bottom of the window pane.

You loved the rain but the joy it once brought was long gone.

Now it only reminded you of Connor. Of the countless times you’d drag him out into the downpour with a pep in your step until you were both soaked, a blissful smile on your face as a begrudging grin slowly broke out across his lips.

It was raining the first time Connor kissed you. It was the most cliché thing you’d ever experienced in your life but that only made you cherish it more. Cherish _him_ more.

The tears had dried up a while ago, but that didn’t stop your eyes from burning.

Footsteps approach your chair from behind.

 _He must’ve broken in_ , you realize. Not that it surprised you, not much did these days.

You keep your head on your knees, your arms hugging your legs, refusing to look up at him- to acknowledge him. Maybe he’d go away.

“Y/N.”

You squeeze your eyes shut, blocking out the world and drowning it in darkness, a darkness that was both consuming and comforting.

“Please leave.”

Your voice breaks over the two simple words and you _hate_ it.

You hate that Connor’s gone.

You hate this situation.

You hate _him-_

No. 

_No,_ _it’s not him you hate. Not really._

You try to believe the words you tell yourself, you really do, but the reminder fails to convince.

His steps are slow but sure -everything about him is always so sure- as they come closer.

“Do you think ignoring me, ignoring your _life,_ is going to help at all?” The question is cool. Flat. But… but the snide that was so characteristic of him was lacking. The derision, the _ice…_ it wasn’t there.

It wasn’t right. He _needed_ to sound haughty. You _wanted_ him to think himself superior, for every single word that passed his lips to be mocking. Otherwise… Otherwise he sounded too much like Connor.

He was both right and wrong, however. You weren’t ignoring your life, not really, you were only grieving. But you _were_ ignoring _him._ And how could you not? He was a manifestation of all that you’d lost, a doppelgänger that was just slightly _off_ in his mannerisms _:_ too different to yield any real semblance of comfort but too similar to bring anything but pain.

He was both the ghost and the executioner. He hadn’t pulled the metaphorical trigger of course, but he’d prevented you from reaching Connor, from dragging Connor’s stupid face behind bulletproof glass.

 _He kept you from sharing Connor’s fate,_ chides a traitorous part of your brain. _He kept you alive._

“I don’t want to talk to you, Colin” you grind out, your eyes squeezed tightly shut.

You flinch when his fingers find your chin, lifting it up off your knees and towards him. “Look at me.”

It was not a suggestion, it was an order, and both of you knew that fact. You keep your eyes shut all the same, however, and it isn’t until he says your name in a chilling tone bordering on accusatory that what’s left of your resolve finally snaps. 

Clenching your jaw, you open your eyes solely to glare daggers at him, your nose crinkling in a subdued snarl. Connor’s face swims in your vision and it’s _wrong, wrong, wrong._ The softness you’d grown so paradisaically used to seeing in Connor’s face was non-existent in Colin’s. Instead, you were met with a mechanically blank expression- and narrowed eyes.

Good. Anger, _frustration_ , you could work with, both his and your own.

“Do you think this is any easier for me? Half the people I know wished I’d died in his place and the other half won’t even look at me,” he says pointedly, fingers remaining on your chin. “I expected more from you.”

When you don’t rise to the taunting bait, only glare unflinchingly back at him, he clenches his jaw.

“I cared about him too,” he reminds, dark brown eyes sharply digging into yours.

“But you weren’t _in love_ with him,” you snap, unable to stop the words from leaving your lips.

There was no doubt in your mind that Colin was emotionally affected by Connor’s death. He felt grief, you weren’t trying to make light of that fact. The love for a brother could be equally as strong as the love for a partner, but… But it _is so_ different. What you felt for Connor… It had _consumed_ you whole, and his death was not any easier for you to process.

For a few moments, all you can hear is your own heartbeat as the two of you stare each other down, neither relenting. You search his eyes for every last particle of anger, of arrogance, of everything remotely negative, and latch onto it for dear life as you stare at the face that haunts you.

“No,” Colin says, at last breaking the drawn-out silence with an unexpected concession. “I wasn’t in love with him.”

There is something off in his tone, in the way something shifts across his face, his expression softening by a fraction. 

The steel is melting. 

The blank mask of his expression changing. His gaze loses everything remotely harsh about it as it trails across your face, lingering over every feature just as his fingers gently lingered on your chin.

Had he been anyone else, had _you_ been anyone else, you may not have noticed the details of his expression. But you knew the face he wore _. Intimately_. You’d studied it for hours at a time and gazed upon daily -but for not nearly enough days-. And the expression he wore… For the first time you’d ever been witness to, traces of sadness could be pinpointed across Colin’s features. It almost looked like- like _longing_ but-

The anger in your glare gradually drains away and is replaced with confusion- with furrowing brows and the beginnings of a realization seizing your lungs.

His hand falls to his side. Whatever was contaminating Colin’s expression is immediately buried, sculpted down and away until nothing of it remained, leaving only his usual unforgiving features. 

Turning towards the window, he stares outside much like you had been before he barged in. The fading light from the sky casts a pale blue hue over his face and for a moment, for a _moment-_

“The rain will stop soon.”

It’s all he says, his own educated premonition, before turning on his heel and doing precisely what you first asked of him. He leaves.


End file.
